You're correct, use of this invented word is ugly.
This is tricky because in an ideal world I think speakability would in fact be speak (as in speak: none or speak: auto) and the existing speak property would work well if it were called pronunciation (pronunciation: normal, pronunciation: spell-out). Still no chance of that now.
'Speaking' doesn't work because it's the present participle of a verb (gerund) and you need a noun construct like speaking-style or an adjective for consistency.
Some alternatives
'speech'
'audibility'
'aural'
?
On Apr 26, 2011, at 10:32 PM, Daniel Weck <daniel.weck@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello !
>
> I am not a native english speaker, so I would like to query your opinion about the 'speakability' property name [1]. A better alternative may be 'speaking', but I'm concerned about its juxtaposition with the existing 'speak' property, and the resulting potential misinterpretations.
>
> Note that although CSS3-Speech is directly "inspired" by SSML [2], the closest equivalent to the 'speak' CSS functionality is described in the "say-as attribute values" W3C Note [3]. I would however not recommend the use of "say-as" instead of 'speak', because in the case of CSS3-Speech, the feature scope is much more limited (in other words, using "say-as" would effectively be misleading).
>
> Regards, Daniel
>
> [1]
> http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-speech/#speaking-props
>
> [2]
> http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis/
>
> [3]
> http://www.w3.org/TR/ssml-sayas/
>